3

Exile and Intrigue

Having scandalised his kingdom by appointing Piers Gaveston as regent, Edward left Dover at dawn on 22 January 1308 and arrived in Boulogne on the 24th, where the French king and his retinue were waiting for him. He arrived three days later than he had arranged with Philip, most probably because of bad weather in the Channel.¹ In winter the crossing was particularly treacherous, and could take several days. The following day, Thursday 25 January, Edward saw his long-term fiancée for the first time, when they married before the door of Notre Dame in Boulogne. Isabella, sixth of the seven children of Philip IV and Joan, queen of Navarre in her own right, was probably born in late 1295, so was over eleven years younger than Edward and only twelve at the time of the wedding.² Her elder sisters Marguerite and Blanche died very young, in or before 1295; one of them might have married Edward instead if she had lived. Her elder brothers Louis, Philip and Charles all reigned as kings of France, her younger brother Robert died a few months after she married Edward, and her mother Queen Joan I of Navarre had died in 1305 in her early thirties. Isabella was named after her paternal grandmother Isabel of Aragon, the first queen of Philip III of France. Her maternal grandfather King Enrique I of Navarre was said to have suffocated in his own fat in 1274, and her maternal grandmother Blanche of Artois, queen of Navarre and countess of Lancaster, was, in a typically confusing example of royal inter-relations, also Edward II’s aunt by marriage.³ Edward and Isabella were fairly closely related: Edward’s grandmother Eleanor of Provence was the younger sister of Isabella’s great-grandmother Marguerite, queen of Louis IX, making them second cousins once removed. Isabella had been betrothed to Edward since the Treaty of Montreuil in June 1299 when she was probably three years old, and thus for as long as she could consciously remember would have known that it was her destiny to marry him.

Edward’s first reaction to his bride is unrecorded. Isabella was said by several contemporaries to be beautiful, and given that her father and brother Charles were known in their lifetimes as le Bel or ‘the Handsome’, she probably was. Perhaps her loveliness impressed her new husband, or perhaps Edward saw only a girl half his age and of no conceivable interest to him. Whether a pubescent girl, beautiful or not, held much appeal for him is an unanswerable question. Isabella has been unjustly vilified down the centuries as ‘the she-wolf of France’, and condemned as wicked and unnatural by writers incensed that a woman could rebel against her lawfully wedded spouse. Nowadays, however, she is more often portrayed as a long-suffering, put-upon victim of her callously neglectful husband who is miraculously transformed into an empowered feminist icon, striking a courageous blow for women everywhere by fighting back against marital oppression and finding an opportunity for self-fulfilment by taking a lover. Depictions of her reflect the way society currently views women who step outside the bounds of conventional behaviour rather than the real Isabella, who was neither a modern feminist and believer in sexual equality transplanted to the Middle Ages, nor an evil unfeminine caricature. Like her husband, Isabella was a complex character with qualities both admirable and not. Avaricious and extravagant to a degree extraordinary even by the standards of fourteenth-century royals, she nevertheless had many fine qualities, including compassion, loyalty, piety and courage. For most of her marriage to Edward, until his behaviour alienated her irrevocably in the 1320s, Isabella was his loyal and supportive companion and ally, and their relationship was far more successful than commonly supposed. This says a great deal about Isabella’s interpersonal skills, as the fiercely emotional and erratic Edward must have been a difficult man to live with.

Whether Isabella had already heard rumours of her new husband’s unsuitable rustic pastimes or about his intense relationship with Piers Gaveston, is not known, and if she had, there was nothing she could do about it. For her wedding, Isabella wore a red cloak lined with yellow sindon, over a gown and tunic in blue and gold; fifty years later, she would be buried with the cloak. Edward wore a satin surcoat and cloak embroidered with jewels, and both wore crowns glittering with precious stones.⁴ With these sumptuous clothes and the good looks ascribed to both of them by contemporaries, they must have looked magnificent, and the wedding was a splendid occasion. Not counting the couple themselves, four kings and three queens attended: Philip IV; his eldest son, eighteen-year-old Louis, king of Navarre; Charles ‘the Lame’, king of Sicily and Naples and titular king of Jerusalem; Marie of Brabant, dowager queen of France and Philip IV’s stepmother; her daughter Marguerite, dowager queen of England and Edward II’s stepmother; Albrecht of Hapsburg, king of Germany, who attended with his wife Elisabeth of Görz-Tirol and their son Leopold, duke of Austria. Also present were Edward’s sister and brother-in-law the duke and duchess of Brabant and the counts of Flanders, Namur, Hainault, Nevers, St Pol, Dreux and Savoy.⁵ Edward, as duke of Aquitaine and count of Ponthieu, performed homage for his lands to Philip on 31 January, an unpleasant, albeit essential, duty he hated.

Isabella brought Edward no dowry; Philip IV made it plain that her marriage portion was the duchy of Aquitaine and Edward’s other lands in France, which his father Edward I had forfeited to the French Crown in 1294. The French king was magnanimously returning the lands to his new son-in-law because he hoped one day to see a grandchild of his holding them, he told Edward and his advisors.⁶ Philip’s wedding presents to Edward included a ‘ring of his realm’ and other jewellery, a bed or couch ‘more beautiful than any other’ and expensive warhorses.⁷ Philip also presented his daughter with a lavish trousseau to take with her to England, including gold crowns, tapestries and seventy-two headdresses, and the twelve-year-old queen probably received a generous gift from her new husband: an illuminated manuscript now known as the Isabella Psalter and held in a library in Munich.⁸ Eight days of celebration and feasting followed the wedding ceremony, with the most magnificent banquet of all taking place on 28 January, hosted by Edward. Two days later, he presided over yet another great feast, with his new queen by his side, and the noblemen present also took part in a jousting event. Edward almost certainly didn’t participate. He showed no great interest in jousting unless Piers Gaveston was competing, which probably demonstrates an interest in Gaveston rather than in the sport. Perhaps if the inhabitants of Boulogne had needed a new ditch to be dug, or had horses in desperate need of shoeing, he would have been their man. All in all, however, it was a superbly lavish occasion, as befitted the wedding of the king of England and the king of France’s daughter, though tensions lurked beneath the glittering surface, as they usually did during Edward’s reign.

After the wedding, Isabella shared Edward’s accommodation, and although it is possible that they consummated their marriage, to make it valid and binding, it is unlikely that they began regular sexual relations. Although Edward needed a son and heir, like all kings, he waited until his wife was old enough to endure pregnancy and childbirth without causing damage to her developing body, and they conceived their first child four years later, when Isabella was sixteen.

Philip IV took the opportunity to present Edward with a list of his grievances concerning Gascony, which Edward ignored. Soon after, he sent the wedding gifts Philip had given him to Piers Gaveston, an act often seen as the first of many examples of Edward’s mistreatment of his wife. Most probably, however, he simply sent them to his friend, whom he trusted more than anyone and who was regent of his kingdom in his absence, to store in a safe place. Sending the gifts to Gaveston does not necessarily imply that Edward intended Gaveston to keep them; the Annales Paulini say that Philip IV ‘gave’ (dedit in the Latin original) the gifts to Edward, who ‘sent’ (misit) them to Gaveston. Although a scene where Gaveston flaunts himself in jewels rightfully belonging to the queen has become a staple of novels featuring Edward II, and much modern non-fiction repeats the tall tale that Edward heartlessly gave away his wife’s jewellery to his lover, the Annales Paulini specify that Philip gave the gifts later sent to Gaveston in England only to Edward, not to Isabella, not even to them jointly.⁹ There is of course no possible reason why Philip would have given his daughter warhorses, and the Annales Paulini do not even mention her or her possessions at this point. Edward giving his wife’s jewels to Gaveston is a modern invention which melts away into nothing in the face of evidence.

While in France, a group of English nobles, including the earls of Pembroke, Lincoln, Surrey and Hereford, put their seals to the Boulogne Agreement or Boulogne Declaration. This document attempted to separate the two sides of kingship: the king as a person, and the Crown, and stated that the barons’ loyalty was due less to the current king than to the Crown itself. This theory was to rear its head again during Edward’s reign. The Agreement probably demonstrates the enormous concern over Edward’s reliance on Piers Gaveston, though it also reflects the conflicts which arose between the king and the barons at the end of Edward I’s reign, and Gaveston was not in fact mentioned. Neither does the document show any hostility towards Edward II personally.¹⁰ Roger Mortimer, the man who many years later became Queen Isabella’s favourite and invaded Edward’s kingdom, was not one of the men who set his seal to the Agreement.¹¹ Mortimer was then twenty, a long-term and loyal companion of the king and Gaveston, and it speaks volumes about Edward II that he later became the king’s most dangerous enemy. The earl of Warwick was another attendee who did not sign the Boulogne Agreement, perhaps rather oddly, as he was shortly to become an enemy of Edward and Gaveston, and had refused to sign the charter granting the earldom of Cornwall to the Gascon.

Edward and Isabella left Boulogne on 3 February and arrived at Dover in mid-afternoon on the 7th, when Isabella got her first look at the country that would be her home for the next half a century.¹² (She never had the chance to meet William Wallace, as shown in Braveheart, as he had been executed two and a half years previously on 23 August 1305.) A group of noble men and women was waiting for them, including Edward’s sisters Mary the nun and Elizabeth, countess of Hereford; Alicia, dowager countess of Norfolk, whose niece Philippa of Hainault would marry Edward and Isabella’s son in 1328; and Earl Thomas of Lancaster’s brother Henry, the king’s first cousin.¹³ The Lancasters were also Isabella’s uncles, younger half-brothers of her mother Queen Joan. She had other relatives in England: the dowager queen Marguerite was her aunt, Edward’s young half-brothers Thomas and Edmund her first cousins, and the earl of Richmond another cousin.¹⁴

When Edward saw Piers Gaveston, he behaved as though the pair had been apart for many months. In front of everybody, Edward demonstrated his ‘improper familiarity’ with Gaveston, and is reported to have ‘run to Piers among them, giving him kisses and repeated embraces; he was adored with a singular familiarity. Which special familiarity, already known to the magnates, furnished fuel to their jealousy.’¹⁵ Edward and Isabella did not travel together, but came ashore separately: ‘the king touched at Dover in his barge … and the queen a little afterward touched here with certain ladies accompanying her,’ so it seems unlikely that Isabella saw her new husband’s enthusiastic greeting of Gaveston, despite the numerous modern novels depicting her shock and horror at the sight.¹⁶ It was not the kissing and embracing themselves that were the problem – the early fourteenth century was a tactile age and kissing on the lips was a common way even for two men to greet each other, with no necessary implications of sexual desire – but that Edward singled Gaveston out for special attention and kissed and embraced his friend more than he kissed and embraced the other barons.¹⁷

Edward and Isabella travelled through Kent towards London, spending five days at Edward’s palace of Eltham on the way, which Bishop Anthony Bek had given to him in 1305 and which he later granted to Isabella. Edward’s treasurer had ordered lampreys from Gloucester for the king to enjoy on his return to England.¹⁸ According to the Annales Paulini, Piers Gaveston held a jousting tournament at Faversham to celebrate the king’s marriage; whether Edward himself attended is unclear, though his route from Dover and Canterbury to London did take him past or through Faversham.¹⁹ On 21 February, the mayor and aldermen of London rode out to greet the new king and queen, and in great procession, cheered by a crowd of thousands, Edward and Isabella rode through the city to the Tower. London was rather less filthy than usual and the streets had been lavishly decorated, so that the city annalist wrote with pride and enormous exaggeration that it resembled ‘a new Jerusalem’.²⁰

On 24 February, Edward and Isabella rode to Westminster for their coronation, which should have taken place on the 18th, but was delayed by a week. Some of the barons had already demanded that Gaveston be exiled from England, and threatened to impede the coronation if he were not, forcing a delay.²¹ Edward’s coronation differed from its predecessors in several respects. Firstly, the wives of peers attended for the first time. Secondly, Edward took his oath in French, not Latin, as his ancestors had done – a fact often unfairly used to condemn him as stupid, lazy and uneducated by some historians.²² This conveniently ignores the fact that Edward, even if he knew no Latin, which is most unlikely, could easily have learnt the short responses by heart, and that French was the native language of just about everyone who attended the coronation and he surely only intended that everyone present understood what was being said. Thirdly, a fourth and new clause was added to the coronation oath, whereby Edward swore to ‘observe the just laws and customs that the community of your realm shall determine’.²³

On the morning of Sunday 25 February 1308, Edward, barefoot and wearing a green robe and black hose, walked from Westminster Hall to the Abbey with Isabella, along a cloth strewn with flowers. Owing to the enormous crush of spectators, the king and queen had to be led into the abbey by a back door. Above them, the barons of the Cinque Ports carried an embroidered canopy, and before them proceeded the prelates and the barons, six men carrying Edward’s gilt spurs, the royal sceptre, the royal rod, and the three royal swords. Roger Frowyk, goldsmith of London, had been paid twenty pounds in late January for repairing the sceptre.²⁴ Then came four men carrying a board covered with checked cloth, on which the royal robes were placed. They were Hugh Despenser the Elder, Roger Mortimer, Thomas de Vere, son of the earl of Oxford, and Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. Eighteen years later, one of these men would order the execution of two of the others. Following Despenser and the others came Edward’s treasurer Walter Reynolds, bishop of Worcester and later archbishop of Canterbury, carrying the paten of the chalice of St Edward the Confessor. Behind him came the chancellor of England, carrying the chalice of St Edward itself. And finally and controversially, Piers Gaveston, just before the king and queen and therefore in prime position, carrying the royal crown. Gaveston was described as ‘so decked out that he more resembled the god Mars than an ordinary mortal’.²⁵ The other earls wore cloth-of-gold (material shot through with gold thread), as they were entitled to do in the king’s presence, but Gaveston, never one to hide his light under a bushel, wore royal purple, of silk, encrusted with pearls. The Annales Paulini complained that Gaveston ‘sought his own glory rather than the king’s’ and was ‘more splendidly dressed than the king’.²⁶ Evidently, Edward didn’t mind. On the day of his coronation, he banned a jousting tournament at Stepney supposedly at the bidding of Piers Gaveston, who feared for his life if it went ahead.²⁷

During the ceremony, Edward allowed Gaveston to put on his right spur, angering many, as these duties were of profound ritual significance, and Edward was publicly placing Gaveston above the rest of the nobility. In the procession back to the palace at the end of the ceremony, Gaveston carried the sword of mercy, which caused more mutterings, or rather shouts, of discontent. Everyone then proceeded to Westminster Hall for a banquet, which Gaveston had organised. Forty ovens were specially constructed and large quantities of wine ordered from Bordeaux, while London merchants supplied ale, ‘large cattle and boars’, sheep and pigs, three fishmongers received £170 for ‘large fish’ and pike, and one John le Discher provided salt-cellars, plates and dishes at a cost of twenty pounds.²⁸ A temporary timber hall at least 500 feet long was built along the river wall by Westminster palace, with fourteen smaller halls crammed in and taking up almost all the space as far as the palace gate, and underground pipes supplied red and white wine and a spiced drink to a fountain which flowed day and night.²⁹ The parlous state of Edward’s finances – his father had left him massive debts of about £200,000 – meant that, despite the money parliament had granted him the previous autumn, he had to pay for the coronation with loans from Italian bankers, the Frescobaldi.³⁰

Unfortunately, the banquet was a fiasco. It was long after dark when it finally got underway, and although there was a vast amount of food, it was badly cooked, badly served and close to inedible. (One wonders if the French had expected anything else of English food.) Edward had ordered tapestries bearing the royal arms, three leopards, and the arms of Piers Gaveston, six eaglets, to adorn the walls of the hall – a very visual sign of the significant position his friend held in his life.³¹ Even by Edward’s standards, pinning up Gaveston’s arms on the walls in place of the royal arms of France, for his wife, was astonishingly tactless. He made matters worse by sitting next to Gaveston and ignoring everyone else, including Isabella, talking and laughing with his friend. Isabella’s two uncles the counts of Valois and Evreux were grievously offended, although it is doubtful that they walked out of the banquet, as has sometimes been stated – which would have been a gross and unforgivable insult to Edward – while one of the English earls had to be restrained from physically assaulting Gaveston. Although it is understandable that a man in his twenties would prefer to talk to a friend he had known for many years than to a twelve-year-old he barely knew, there is no doubt that Edward’s behaviour was extremely insulting to his wife, the French and the French king. Whether he intended to be rude, or just didn’t care, is not certain, but offending his powerful father-in-law was incredibly foolish behaviour. Many illustrious guests visited the coronation and banquet, and thus witnessed Edward’s discourteous conduct. Edward’s sister Margaret and his brother-in-law John II, duke and duchess of Brabant, Isabella’s uncles Charles of Valois and Louis of Evreux, and her brother, the future King Charles IV, attended. The king’s cousin Arthur, duke of Brittany – like Edward, a grandson of Henry III – was there, with his brother-in-law, Guy, count of St Pol. Arthur had succeeded his father as duke of Brittany in 1305, when the unfortunate John II was killed in possibly the most extraordinary freak accident of the era: a wall collapsed on him as he led Pope Clement V’s horse around Avignon. Edward’s sister Mary the nun, their young half-brothers Thomas and Edmund, Count Amadeus V of Savoy, Count Gaston I of Foix and Henry of Luxembourg, future Holy Roman Emperor, brought up the rear of distinguished guests.³²

After the banquet, the counts of Valois and Evreux returned to France and complained to Philip IV that Edward ‘frequented Piers’ couch more than the queen’s’.³³ According to the much later chronicler Thomas Walsingham, Isabella herself wrote to her father declaring that her husband was ‘an entire stranger to my bed’, called herself ‘the most wretched of wives’, and accused Gaveston of being the cause of all her troubles, by alienating Edward’s affection from her and leading him into improper company.³⁴Isabella’s letters from this period do not survive, however, and the story cannot be corroborated; Walsingham, writing many decades later, had no access to the queen of England’s private correspondence to her father in 1308. The Annales Paulini reported the widespread rumour that Edward ‘loved an evil male sorcerer more than he did his wife, a most handsome lady and a very beautiful woman’, and the Vita said that ‘Piers was accounted a sorcerer’, as Edward was ‘incapable of moderate favour, and on account of Piers was said to forget himself’.³⁵ Edward’s lack of attention towards Isabella – who at twelve was hardly a woman yet – is unlikely to have stemmed from callousness, or a desire to be cruel to her. As she was too young to be his wife in anything more than name or to be of any use to him politically, he seems barely to have thought of her at all. It is difficult, however, to condemn Edward for shunning the bed of a girl of only twelve. Even in the fourteenth century, it was extremely rare for girls to become pregnant at a very young age.³⁶Edward’s three de Clare nieces all married at thirteen, but didn’t bear their first children until they were sixteen or seventeen. His sister Margaret married at fifteen, was still living apart from her husband three years later and bore her only child when she was twenty-five, and other sisters, Eleanor and Joan, didn’t marry until they were twenty-four and eighteen respectively. Edward’s grandmother Eleanor of Provence married Henry III in early 1236 when she was twelve or thirteen, and bore her first child three and a half years later. Still, Edward could have treated Isabella with far more respect and consideration than he did. Despite her youth, she was his wife and his queen.

Parliament opened at Westminster three days after the coronation. Edward’s antics had strengthened the already strong opposition to his favourite, and ‘almost all of the earls and barons of England rose against Piers Gaveston, binding themselves by a mutual oath never to cease from what they had begun until Piers had left the land of England’.³⁷ Edward’s only allies at this parliament were Thomas, earl of Lancaster, his cousin and Isabella’s uncle, and Hugh Despenser the Elder. Despenser was the brother-in-law of the earl of Warwick, and is known as ‘the Elder’ to distinguish him from his son of the same name, who would become Edward II’s great favourite in the late 1310s. Despenser the Elder was twenty-three years older than Edward but a close friend, and the only nobleman to remain completely loyal to Edward from the beginning to the end of his reign. Almost all the other earls and magnates demanded Gaveston’s exile; he had ‘aroused the hatred of nearly all the great lords of England, because the new king loved him excessively and irrationally, and supported him totally’.³⁸ The situation deteriorated rapidly. Edward was almost friendless, but determined to keep Gaveston at his side, and determined also to challenge the right of his nobles to impose conditions on him against his will. This was typical of Edward, who loved going out into the fields and digging ditches or building walls, chatting with craftsmen and villeins, yet the next minute stood on all his royal rights and dignity.

Edward spent Easter preparing for war. Afraid that his magnates might seize Gaveston, he fortified Windsor Castle as a stronghold where the favourite could remain in safety, and as a further precaution ordered the nearby bridges at Staines and Kingston to be dismantled, which must have annoyed the locals. At the end of April 1308, Edward returned to parliament, where he faced fresh demands to exile Gaveston. Emotionally reliant on his friend to a very great extent and unable to imagine life without him, Edward continued to refuse. Within a few months of his accession, he had brought his country to the brink of civil war over his emotional reliance on the arrogant Gaveston, who ‘lorded it over them [the barons] like a second king, to whom all were subject and none equal’.³⁹ Edward’s behaviour became the talk of the kingdom, and his popularity plummeted, according to Lanercost: ‘The murmurs increased from day to day, and engrossed the lips and ears of all men, nor was there one who had a good word either for the king or for Piers.’⁴⁰ The Vita stated that ‘the seditious quarrel between the lord king and the barons spread far and wide through England, and the whole land was much desolated by such a tumult … it was held for certain that the quarrel once begun could not be settled without great destruction’. A letter written at this time agreed: ‘Very evil are the times in England now; and there are many who fear that worse times are still in store for us.’⁴¹ The writer was correct, and the pattern of impending civil war would repeat itself over and over for the next few years, as Edward lurched from one crisis to the next, crises almost entirely of his own making.

The barons had a useful ally on their side: the king of France. A newsletter of 14 May claimed that unless Piers Gaveston left England, Philip IV ‘will pursue as his mortal enemies all who support the said Piers’.⁴² Lanercost says that Philip ‘cordially detested’ Gaveston, ‘because, as was commonly said, the king of England, having married his daughter, loved her indifferently because of the aforesaid Piers’, and the Polychronicon also says that Edward neglected Isabella for Gaveston.⁴³ Both these chronicles, however, were written with many years’ hindsight, after Edward’s later favourite Hugh Despenser (the Younger) had succeeded in driving Isabella from her husband’s presence in the 1320s, and it may be that the authors confused Gaveston with Despenser. Edward’s supposed and frequently exaggerated neglect of Isabella was probably not the main reason for Philip’s hostility; Gaveston’s father Arnaud had escaped from Philip’s custody when the French king was (legitimately) holding him as a hostage, and Gaveston himself had fought against Philip’s forces in Flanders in 1297.⁴⁴ Whatever the reason for Philip’s animosity to Gaveston, it was shared by his half-sister Marguerite, Edward’s stepmother, and the French royals were said to have sent £40,000 to the English earls to fund their opposition to the royal favourite.⁴⁵ Even if this means livres tournois, the equivalent of £10,000 sterling, it still seems a ludicrous exaggeration. Whatever the correct amount of money, Edward retaliated by taking Marguerite’s castles of Marlborough and Devizes into his own hands.⁴⁶ For the remaining ten years that she was alive, Marguerite played little if any role in Edward’s life, and seems mostly to have stayed away from court, her relations with her stepson perhaps soured by her actions and Edward’s anger with her.

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Edward granted his county of Ponthieu, which yielded revenues of about £1,300 a year, to his young wife on 14 May, the day the newsletter was written.⁴⁷ It is probably significant, and a sign of Edward’s good faith towards Isabella and her father, that he granted her Ponthieu, as in 1306 he had intended to give the county to Piers Gaveston. His friend spent his brief exile there in 1307 at Edward’s order, rather than in Gascony, as originally commanded by Edward I.⁴⁸ Isabella’s role as leader of the opposition to Piers Gaveston is often overstated. At twelve, she was hardly in a position to play a significant role in politics, and the poor girl was thrust into a tense and difficult situation a grown woman might have struggled with. Her aunt the dowager queen, who could have helped her, withdrew from court, leaving her alone and vulnerable in a foreign country with a husband who made it clear that Piers Gaveston was his main priority, even above herself. However, although Edward and Isabella’s marriage began and ended badly, for most of their relationship, there was genuine affection between the couple. Few of their personal letters survive, but one in which Edward called Isabella his ‘dear heart’ is still extant, as is one of Isabella’s, in which she addressed Edward as ‘my very sweet heart’ five times.⁴⁹ Although often depicted as a neglectful husband, Edward frequently demonstrated great concern for Isabella’s well-being, and for many years she supported him with notable loyalty.

At parliament in late April and early May 1308, Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln and leader of the formidable coalition opposed to Edward and Gaveston, demanded once again the favourite’s exile. Only a handful of barons and knights remained loyal to Edward at this time. One was his cousin the earl of Lancaster, who seems, however, not to have offered Edward any practical help, and another was John of Brittany, earl of Richmond, who was rather insignificant politically. Richmond was in his early forties and a first cousin of Edward II and Lancaster, his mother Beatrice being the sister of Edward I, and was the brother of the duke of Brittany. Other loyal allies were Guy Ferre, son of Edward’s former tutor of the same name, and John Cromwell, Roger Mortimer and Hugh Despenser the Elder.⁵⁰

On 18 May, having held out for many weeks, and faced with civil war, Edward finally gave in and agreed to exile his friend.⁵¹ As a sop, and at Edward’s insistence, Gaveston was allowed to keep his title of earl of Cornwall, but all his lands reverted to the Crown. In compensation, Edward granted him £2,000 worth of lands in his homeland of Gascony, including the city of Bayonne and the island of Oléron, and lands worth another £2,000 in England jointly to Gaveston and his wife Margaret, so he suffered no loss of income.⁵² Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury, threatened to excommunicate Gaveston if he didn’t leave the country by 25 June. Anyone who impeded his departure or aided his return, except the king and queen, would face the same penalty.⁵³Gaveston’s fourteen-year-old wife was not included in her husband’s exile, and was to be granted £2,000 a year from the revenues of Cornwall for her sustenance if she remained in England. However, Margaret accompanied Gaveston to Ireland, either on her husband’s orders or her uncle’s.⁵⁴

On 16 June 1308, Edward hit on the idea of making Gaveston lord lieutenant of Ireland, a position he had granted to the earl of Ulster only the day before, thus ensuring that Gaveston left the country in triumph, not in disgrace.⁵⁵ Edward went to Bristol with his niece and nephew-in-law to see them off, and gave them a staggeringly generous gift of £1,180.⁵⁶ The Gavestons sailed on 28 June, three days after the deadline imposed by the archbishop of Canterbury. A distraught and furious Edward travelled to Windsor to be reunited with his queen.

Within a year of his accession, Edward managed to annoy his barons beyond bearing, offend the king of France, face civil war, act as though another person were his co-ruler, and give his barons little option but to force his beloved friend out of the country for the second time. His infatuation with Gaveston was almost entirely to blame. Edward was incapable of moderation, as his contemporaries remarked; if he had been more even-handed with his favour, his relationship with his friend would not have been such an issue. However, in his great love for Gaveston, he elevated him almost to the status of joint king. It is impossible to say how Edward felt about the hatred and resentment that his relationship with Gaveston and his friend’s consequent domination of his favour engendered, whether he was even aware of it, or merely indifferent. His love for his friend blinded him to reality and to the foolishness of his actions.

There was no chance that Edward would tolerate Piers Gaveston’s absence for long, and everyone must have realised it. Over the following year, Edward made strenuous and adroit efforts to get his friend back. Nine days before Gaveston even left England, Edward wrote to Pope Clement V and King Philip IV, giving a rather questionable version of the whole affair. He claimed that the earldom of Cornwall had been granted to Gaveston without Gaveston’s prior knowledge, and at the urging of the barons.⁵⁷ This second point, at least, was not true. Edward also wrote that his magnates ‘rose up against us in grave fashion, that they had no qualms to present themselves to us many times as enemies and complainers; and from this, one truly fears scandals and even graver dangers could arise in the kingdom and these lands’.⁵⁸ On the same day he wrote this, Edward granted the castle and town of Blanquefort in Gascony to the pope’s nephew and namesake, Bertrand de Got.⁵⁹ Candidly, Edward explained that he hoped the grant would inspire the pope to regard his affairs more favourably, and asked him to lift the conditional sentence of excommunication on Gaveston.

Meanwhile, Edward’s infatuation with his friend and subsequent lack of interest in Scotland were greatly aiding Robert Bruce in his campaign to make himself king in more than name only. In the spring of 1308, Bruce inflicted a heavy defeat on his greatest enemy John Comyn, earl of Buchan, a relative of John ‘the Red Comyn’ whom Bruce had killed in 1306. Buchan fled to England, where Edward welcomed him, though he died before 27 November 1308.⁶⁰ The remnant of the Comyn faction, which had dominated Scottish politics for decades, also removed themselves to England, including the young children of the Red Comyn. Edward lost the support in 1308 of another Scottish earl, William of Ross, who had previously been so anti-Bruce that he captured Bruce’s womenfolk in September 1306 and sent them to Edward I to be imprisoned. Geographically isolated by Buchan’s defeat, pressed hard by Bruce and his army, Ross sent pleas to Edward to assist him, writing, ‘May help come from you, our lord, if it please you, for in you, Sire, is all our hope and trust.’⁶¹ Placing all one’s military hope and trust in Edward II was a bad idea, and Edward did nothing to help. Ross had little choice but to submit to Bruce and remained totally loyal to him for the rest of his life, a reminder of Edward’s failure to retain a useful ally. The earl of Dunbar and lord of Argyll, who stayed in Scotland, were loyal to Edward, and so were other Scottish lords, including the eighteen-year-old earl of Fife Duncan MacDuff, now Edward’s nephew-in-law as the husband of Mary Monthermer, one of Joan of Acre’s daughters. The earls of Atholl, Angus and Strathearn lived in England by choice, and the young earl of Mar, Robert Bruce’s nephew Donald, remained in prison at Bristol Castle. However, Bruce’s campaign to make himself true king and ruler of Scotland was gaining rapid momentum. More and more men flocked to his banner.

In June 1308, Edward ordered a muster of his army at Carlisle for 22 August, to march into Scotland.⁶² But he cancelled the campaign and signed a truce, after Philip IV sent his brother the count of Evreux and the bishop of Soissons to negotiate peace between the countries.⁶³ War in Scotland was part of Edward II’s inheritance from his father, an unwinnable war which gobbled up his treasury and which he had no choice but to continue, willingly or not. Edward was far more interested in trying to bring Gaveston back to England than campaigning in Scotland. Over the next few months, he used a policy of ‘divide and conquer’ among his barons; he ‘tried to break up their confederacy and draw over the more powerful to his side’. Edward also used his powers of patronage to reconcile them, granting them lands, favours and positions, with the aim of persuading them to agree to Gaveston’s return; he ‘bent one after another to his will, with gifts, promises and blandishments’, which eventually had the desired result.⁶⁴ The natural loyalty of the magnates to the king helped him here. With Gaveston gone, there was little reason for most of them to continue opposing him.

In September 1308, the king spent some time at Byfleet in Surrey, one of Piers Gaveston’s manors, where Edward had accommodation, and entertained the earls of Lancaster and Surrey.⁶⁵ At the end of the month, he attended a double wedding at Waltham Abbey in Essex: his seventeen-year-old nephew Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, married Maud de Burgh, and Gloucester’s sister Elizabeth, just two weeks past her thirteenth birthday, married Maud’s brother John de Burgh, eldest son and heir of the earl of Ulster. Many of the magnates had planned to hold a Round Table jousting tournament at the wedding, ‘but some of them were afraid of being beset, and dreaded treachery, so that the plans came to nought’.⁶⁶ Edward himself attempted to hold a ‘King of the Greenwood’ tournament at Kennington, which also came to nothing when the barons refused to attend.⁶⁷

While Edward was manipulating his earls to return to his side, his cousin Lancaster bucked the trend and left court, in November 1308. Until then, he had been in more or less continuous attendance on Edward, and what happened at this time is uncertain, but Lancaster gradually moved into the position of opposition to Edward that he would maintain for the remainder of his life, and the two men came to loathe each other. It is unlikely that Piers Gaveston was the cause of the breakdown in the cousins’ relationship, as he was in Ireland, and Lancaster had always supported the pair, if in a rather lukewarm manner. There seems to have been no sudden, violent rift between the men, and possibly, Lancaster’s departure arose from a trivial matter, and he was too stubborn or too proud to return to Edward afterwards.⁶⁸ Edward and Lancaster were very alike in some ways, both of them unable to set aside their own personal likes and dislikes in the interests of policy. The men had been close before Edward’s accession: a letter written by Edward in 1305, in response to one sent by Lancaster apologising that he could not attend Edward owing to illness, stated that he would come to visit Lancaster instead, ‘to see and to comfort you’.⁶⁹ Lancaster was about five or six years older than his cousin, son of the dowager queen Blanche of Navarre, grandson of Henry III, uncle of the queen of England, brother-in-law of the king of France. He was already the proud owner of three earldoms, Lancaster, Leicester and Derby, and in due course would inherit his father-in-law the earl of Lincoln’s two as well. His vast wealth and landholdings made him enormously influential, and the loss of his support was a severe blow to the king.

On 20 December 1308, Edward founded and generously endowed the Dominican priory at Langley in Hertfordshire where he would bury Piers Gaveston a few years later, ‘in fulfilment of a vow made by the king in peril’, whenever that might have been – probably on one of his sea crossings or on campaign in Scotland.⁷⁰ Edward, like his mother Eleanor of Castile, was a patron of the Dominicans, the Friars Preacher or Black Friars, and all his confessors were Dominican; the mutual affection of the king and the Dominicans lasted for many years.⁷¹ Edward spent Christmas and New Year at Windsor with Queen Isabella, though he stayed at his favourite residence of Langley, where he often retired at times of stress and where he had spent much time with Gaveston, for most of December and the first few months of 1309. He might have seen the total eclipse of the sun on 1 February, which the Sempringham annalist claims, implausibly, to have lasted from midday until five in the afternoon, and presumably met the archbishop of Nazareth when he visited England in late January.⁷² In February 1309, a whale supposedly eighty feet long was caught in the Thames, to the excitement of the St Paul’s and London annalists.⁷³

Edward began to treat his young wife with increasing respect, and in March and April 1309 gave her a cash grant of £1,122 and lands in Cheshire and North Wales, with the revenues backdated to the previous September.⁷⁴ On 4 March, Edward wrote to Philip IV, telling him that Isabella was in good health and ‘will, God willing, be fruitful’.⁷⁵ Over time, Isabella became one of the great landowners of the realm, although the lands normally granted to the queen were still held by her aunt, the dowager queen Marguerite. In 1309, Edward continued to work on his earls, consumed with the need to bring Gaveston back from his Irish exile, where he was excelling in his role as lord lieutenant.⁷⁶ By June, he could count, more or less, on the support of a majority of his earls. In March 1309, Edward sent the bishops of Worcester and Norwich, and the earls of Pembroke and Richmond, to Avignon to speak to the pope on Gaveston’s behalf.⁷⁷

In late March or early April 1309, many of Edward’s earls and barons met at a jousting tournament at Dunstable, apparently as a cover to discuss their complaints against the king.⁷⁸ Help soon came from another quarter, however: Pope Clement V gave Edward a pleasant twenty-fifth birthday present on 25 April 1309, when he agreed to nullify Winchelsey’s threat to excommunicate Piers Gaveston.⁷⁹ Clement granted the absolution because Edward had finally been able to convince him, rather stretching the truth, that the dispute between the magnates and himself was settled. Parliament opened at Westminster two days later, although Edward didn’t deign to appear until the beginning of May. Perhaps he knew that his barons intended to present a list of eleven grievances against his rule, which they worked out while supposedly jousting at Dunstable.⁸⁰ The grievances concerned escheators, purveyance, writs, petitions and the like, and included the statement that Edward had lost Scotland. Although this was somewhat inaccurate, as Scotland had never exactly been ‘won’, Edward’s father had been acknowledged as overlord of the country in the early 1290s, while his own chances of imposing any kind of dominance over Scotland and Robert Bruce were receding ever further into the distance.

Edward, always willing to compromise himself in Piers Gaveston’s interests, tried to turn baronial dissatisfaction to his own advantage, and promised that he would address the complaints in the next parliament if his barons consented to Gaveston’s return. Despite his best efforts, most of the earls refused. However, Clement V’s bull nullifying Gaveston’s excommunication soon arrived, and on 11 June 1309, a triumphant Edward read it out. Three days later, levels of tension high, Edward ordered another ban on jousting tournaments, naming the earls of Lancaster, Gloucester, Surrey, Arundel and Warwick, but not Hereford, Lincoln, Richmond or Pembroke.⁸¹ The abrupt changes in relations between Edward and his earls can be dizzying, and precisely why he feared the intentions of his nephew Gloucester and nephew-in-law Surrey at this time is not clear, as they had supported him for most of the previous year.

With the threat of excommunication gone, Edward boldly recalled Piers Gaveston without baronial consent. On 27 June, a year almost to the day since he had left, the favourite returned to England, jubilant at his accomplishments in Ireland and at his return. Edward travelled to Chester to meet him, delighted at the success of his strategy and to be reunited with his beloved. ‘Very thankfully receiving him with honour as his brother’, Edward greeted him as ‘one returning from a long pilgrimage, [and] passed pleasant days with him’.⁸²

Parliament opened again on 27 July 1309 at Stamford in Lincolnshire, Edward appearing with Gaveston at his side, to the dismay of many. On 5 August, Gaveston was restored to the lands of his earldom of Cornwall.⁸³ Two chroniclers say that the magnates grudgingly agreed to Gaveston’s restoration on condition that he behave well towards them in the future.⁸⁴ On the other hand, the Vita says that ‘none of the barons now dared to raise a finger against him [Gaveston] or to lay any complaint about his return. Their ranks wavered, and their party, divided against itself, broke up. So he who had twice been condemned to exile returned exulting and in state.’⁸⁵ The king now had to keep his promise to address the baronial grievances, codified as the Statute of Stamford, but, Edward being Edward, he thought he could wriggle out of it. Promises he made under duress, or while he was trying to recall his male favourites on the many occasions when they were banished from England, meant little to him.

Edward had done it. The previous year had shown him capable of great energy, persistence, diplomacy, and adeptness at playing off his barons, binding them to him by giving them lands and favours, and breaking up their formidable alliance. It was a shame for his realm that he didn’t use his undoubted abilities more often, and actually govern his country, but he usually acted only when his friends and therefore his personal feelings were involved. The rest of the time, he hardly bothered, which his subjects must have found intensely frustrating.

Piers Gaveston was back from exile. Neither he nor Edward II had learned a thing from the experience, and they spent the next couple of years proving that they had no political sense whatsoever.